


your ear to the wound that whispers

by poppunkpadfoot



Series: sikenwolfstar [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Community: HPFT, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by Richard Siken, M/M, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, Second War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:40:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23423329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppunkpadfoot/pseuds/poppunkpadfoot
Summary: Don’t make a noise,don’t leave the room until I come back from the dead for you.-- You Are Jeff, Richard Siken
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: sikenwolfstar [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684948
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	your ear to the wound that whispers

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, and welcome to sikenwolfstar, where I write wolfstars inspired by snippets of Richard Siken poetry (as tweeted by sikenbot on twitter)! This particular story was inspired by a snippet from You Are Jeff. The title is a line from that same poem.

On Thursday morning, Remus wakes up early. Not for any reason in particular — he has nowhere to be, nothing urgent to do — he just wakes up, squinting sleepily against the light filtering in through Sirius’s bedroom window, and absently, distantly marvels at the weight of Sirius’s arm over his waist, at the steady sound of his breathing.

Even though it’s been months, it’s all still a bit surreal — having Sirius in front of him every day, being able to touch him, knowing he’s innocent — loving him again. No less surreal is the fact of waking up every morning in Sirius’s childhood bedroom, a space Remus had never seen before this year but which is almost exactly as he’d always imagined it.

It’s hardly ideal. Grimmauld Place is dismal, and the opposite of what Sirius needs after… after everything. But, as Remus reminds him frequently, this arrangement isn’t permanent. The war will end, and they’ll buy a cottage together, somewhere far away from Number 12 and its ghosts, with a room for Harry and a big yard for Padfoot, in a town where nobody knows their names.

It will all get better someday soon. This is what Remus tells himself, even as the reports get grimmer and Order meetings more tense. He and Sirius — together, they can get through anything, even a second war and a house full of ghosts. That they’re together again now is, at least, something.

He gets out of bed and makes them both some breakfast, toast and bacon and eggs over-easy, and when Sirius comes downstairs he looks, for once, well-rested, and they bicker over the crossword puzzle in that day’s Prophet with their legs intertwined under the table.

On Friday morning, Remus wakes up and Sirius is dead.

* * *

It doesn’t feel real.

If Remus had thought things were surreal before, that was nothing compared to how things feel now. He spends the day wandering around the house in a daze, and keeps finding himself standing in one spot, staring at the wall, not knowing how long he’s been still.

There’s no body; there’s nothing to bury; there will be no funeral. No one has said as much, but Remus still knows it. A proper one would be too suspicious, and the only one who’d think to arrange anything else would be, well… him, and he’s… he can’t do it, he can’t even think about it.

There’s no body, and maybe that’s why Remus is half-expecting the door to open and Sirius to walk in. Maybe that’s why whenever he wakes up, there’s a moment where he wonders where Sirius has gotten off to, why he’s not in bed next to him.

On Thursday, he runs out of bread and tea, and it’s only the fact that these are the essentials that compels him to leave the house. He can hardly send Kreacher out for them; in fact, he hasn’t even seen Kreacher since Sirius died. ( _Since Sirius died_ — he thinks it quite casually, and only after the thought has fully crossed his mind does the accompanying jab of grief hit him in the chest.) The walk to the store is somehow both a slog and a blur; and once there he spends an inordinate amount of time staring blankly at the tomatoes and the different types of bread and the shelf stocked with breakfast cereals, and picking things up only to put them back down again. But finally, he walks out of the shop with a sparsely-filled paper bag (bread, tea, margarine, milk, and a cheap pound of stewing beef) and starts to head back to Grimmauld Place. He tries, for a moment, to feel some semblance of pride over his excursion. In this one, small thing he has come away victorious. He left the house, and the world didn’t come crashing down around him as soon as he stepped out the door. He went to the grocery store and didn’t burst out weeping at the sight of Sirius’s preferred brand of coffee. He has enough rations to survive another week, so while he sits in Sirius’s room and stares out the window, or wanders vacantly through the house’s oppressive hallways, he at least won’t be faint with hunger —

But trying to see any of this as a win makes him feel pathetic, and so he quickly stops trying. How mercilessly he has been reduced to a scavenger, looking for nourishment in fleeting moments and the most meagre of victories, in the vain hope that it will lend him more substantial form than this shadow of an existence. ( _Hello, old friend,_ says the scavenger into his ear, _did you really think you were rid of me? Are you really such a fool?)_ So he tries to let the grocery run be just a grocery run, and he keeps putting one foot in front of the other, and he’s almost all the way back to the house when —

He sees him out of the corner of his eye, in bits and pieces at first — long, dark hair piled messily into a bun, a worn leather jacket, the curling smoke of an unseen cigarette — but even before he turns his head to see the whole picture, he can feel the broken pieces in his chest falling back into place, realigning. It’s the satisfaction of finishing a tricky jigsaw puzzle, of stacking his books _just so_ on an overflowing shelf. Yes, of course — of course if anyone were to be clever enough to get out of that veil it would be Sirius; of course he’s just a few feet ahead of Remus, walking briskly down the sidewalk as though he has someplace important to be. He’s on his way home, Remus realizes — of course he is, where else would he be going — and maybe if he hurries, if he Apparates, he can get there first, so that someone will be waiting when Sirius arrives, be there to welcome him back, to say _I’m sorry we left you, we should’ve known you’d be back — I’m so happy you’re here, you’re finally here, welcome home._ He’ll make him dinner — he wishes he’d have known, because he would’ve bought something nicer than the fucking stewing beef, but he’ll try his best to make it tender. And maybe, maybe, Sirius will say _it’s alright, Moony — I forgive you — I didn’t think I could get back either,_ and they will marvel together at this miracle, at how wonderful it is, and maybe Sirius will kiss his neck, right at that spot he likes, and say _I love you, Remus_ , and Remus will say it back — slowly, luxuriously, knowing that now they have all the time in the world.

Except it’s not Sirius — it never was. The imposter has looked back towards him, past him, at someone behind him that he can’t see, and although his eyes move frantically, searching out the familiar details they’re expecting to see, he already knows. He knows.

“Jocelyn!” the imposter cries, in a voice that is not Sirius’s, from unfamiliar lips. “Hurry up, will you? We’re going to be late,” and everything inside of him has already fallen back apart.

He realizes, suddenly, that he has dropped his shopping bag. The milk is pooling traitorously on the sidewalk, soaking into the cracks, and he can’t afford to replace it, and Sirius is gone. There are hot tears on his face, and he’s not quite sure where they came from or when they appeared. Somewhere deep in the depths of his mind, he knows — he’s aware — that to any passers-by he is, by all appearances, literally crying over spilt milk; but he can’t stop and he can’t move, and if Sirius were here he would laugh, but Sirius is not here (he is starting to feel sick with shame, that he could confuse someone else for Sirius, that he’s even capable of making such a mistake). Sirius is dead, and Remus will be drinking his tea black for the rest of the week.

* * *

For the most part, the rest of the Order leaves Remus alone. If he’s being honest, he has mixed feelings about it, because, well… it _is_ what he wants, really — to be left alone — but at the same time, he doesn’t remember telling anyone else that.

He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised; after all, he hadn’t put very much effort into befriending the other ( _newer, younger)_ members of the Order, being instead a bit preoccupied with, well… Sirius. In an awed sort of way at first, not wanting to waste a single moment that could otherwise be spent talking to him, looking at him, touching him; and then later in a grim, thankless way as he’d tried to hold Sirius together, monitoring his increasingly-low moods, trying to stop him from doing something drastic (fighting Snape, fighting Dumbledore, fighting his mother, fighting Remus), trying to keep him both alive and in the house, just for a little longer, just until they find Peter —

And now here he is, entirely alone, left to wallow in the rotted fruits of his labours. He’d failed — except that, with Sirius gone, he’s got nothing left to focus on besides how stupid the whole situation had been, how utterly thoughtless it had been for anyone to lock Sirius up _here_.

Exactly one week and one day after Sirius went through the veil, the one person Remus _least_ wants to see shows up at the front door.

Remus should’ve looked through the peephole first — if he had, he wouldn’t’ve opened the door — but he’d been, as was not unusual this past week, going through the motions, and had answered it without thinking, and now here he is, face to face with Albus Dumbledore.

“Remus,” Dumbledore says solemnly. “I wanted to stop by and offer my condolences.”

Remus doesn’t reply — he’s not sure he could if he wanted to. His throat feels very tight, and blood is starting to rush in his ears; Dumbledore’s still talking, but Remus can’t take in his words. His tone is soft and sympathetic, and all Remus can think is that he’s _completely full of shit._

It had been _his_ idea to keep Sirius locked up in Grimmauld Place; even though Remus had proposed alternatives, Dumbledore had insisted. He’d insisted even as Sirius broke down in front of Remus’s eyes, even as he faded away in every moment he wasn’t crackling with anger. But it had all been very well and good for Dumbledore; he got the headquarters he wanted, and he didn’t have to think about Sirius at all.

That was the problem, in the end, wasn’t it?

“You did this,” he hears himself say, interrupting Dumbledore’s platitudes. He is trembling. “You killed him. You did this. It was _you_.”

Dumbledore says nothing; he simply bows his head, a gesture of false contrition, an actor dutifully playing out the role he has been assigned.

Remus wants to kill him. In his mind’s eye he is sinking his teeth into Albus’s throat and ripping out his jugular; in his mind’s eye Albus is dying a slow and painful and endless death, and it is what he deserves, because that was the death that he had consigned Sirius to without a second thought. _You must have known, old man; you must have known that this house was full of ghosts, that it would devour Sirius alive if you let it. You let it. Why did you let it?_ In his mind’s eye it matters, what Albus did; he will not get away with it. In actual fact, Remus is standing there trembling, and his mouth is not full of blood, and Albus is performing contrition for no other reason than to wash clean his own conscience.

“Fuck you,” Remus says. “Stay away from me,” and he slams the door.

* * *

After the visit from Dumbledore, Remus spends a few days in a rage — the quiet, thrumming kind that sits just under his skin, distracting but not all-consuming. There’s nothing much for him to do besides sit around the house and simmer — but it’s almost a relief at this point. The anger is a welcome distraction from the grief.

He’s so wrapped up in it all, though, that he almost forgets the full moon. When he wakes up one morning with a familiar ache settled deep in his bones, he is faintly, distantly surprised.

The thought comes to him as he’s standing in the kitchen, waiting for his toast (it feels as though he just bought groceries yesterday, but he’s already down to the heels of the loaf), that perhaps instead of locking himself up in the cellar he could reinforce all the doors and windows and let the wolf loose inside the house. Perhaps it could do what magic couldn’t — destroy all the darkness, shred the tapestry to pieces, rip Walburga Black’s portrait from the wall and silence her once and for all. All the things Remus has thought about, but knows he can’t do. It would be almost poetic, he thinks; Sirius had given so much to the wolf; as one final, solitary gift, the wolf could give something back.

He’s almost, almost seriously considering it when it occurs to him — what will ( _would_ ) Sirius think when he comes home ( _no — if he comes home — no —_ )? That the place has been ransacked, or attacked, that it’s not safe to be here? ( _Although — was it ever?_ ) Would he be delighted by the destruction of his prison, or would he feel violated, feel his boundaries had been crossed? And besides, he realizes bitterly, it’s just too risky. The cellar has just one entrance to secure. The house has many.

So he spends the night in the cellar, and when he emerges in the morning, nothing has changed. His whole body hurts, and all the furnishings are untouched and dusty, and he’s bleeding, he’s bleeding, and Sirius is still gone.

He can feel, as he stands there staring dully at the tapestry hanging unharmed on the wall, his rage slipping away — and he grasps for it with desperate fingers, but it evades him nimbly, replaced in short order with heavy, bone-deep exhaustion.

 _He’s dead_ , he tells himself, aiming for stern but landing somewhere in the realm of ‘helpless’. _He’s dead, he’s gone, he's not coming back, you have to stop doing this to yourself —_ and he stares hard at the blackened, burned-out hole where Sirius used to be, as thought that will be what makes it finally, finally sink in. But his eyes will not focus; they drift across the meaner faces, into every corner and crevice, as though he will find Sirius hiding there.

He goes upstairs. In Sirius’s bedroom, he pulls out a record at random, places it onto the turntable, only fumbles a little. The music starts to play, and Remus stands still, and breathes in, and breathes out, and if he tries he can hear Sirius outside in the hallway — if he tries he can hear Sirius — _Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I’ll keep walking toward the sound of your voice._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! A few things before you go:
> 
> 1) The very last line of this fic is taken directly from You Are Jeff by Richard Siken. The full stanza that includes this last line, as well as the Sikenbot snippet that inspired this fic, is stanza 21, copied in full below.
> 
> 2) Endless, endless thanks to my wonderful friend facingthenorthwind. I'm sorry that I committed this crime against you personally. If it helps, I treasure you deeply! Also thanks to gothzabini for the beta <3
> 
> 3) I feel the need to acknowledge _that the science of cartography is limited_ by Rave, which did the whole "Remus lingers around Grimmauld Place, half-convinced that Sirius is going to walk in any second" thing far better than I could ever hope to, and which is (in my humble opinion) one of the greatest wolfstars of all time.
> 
> _21  
>  Hold onto your voice. Hold onto your breath. Don't make a noise,  
> don't leave the room until I come back from the dead for you. I will  
> come back from the dead for you. This could be a city. This could be a  
> graveyard. This could be the basket of a big balloon. Leave the lights  
> on. Leave a trail of letters like those little knots of bread we used to  
> dream about. We used to dream about them. We used to do a lot of  
> things. Put your hand to the knob, your mouth to the hand, pick up the  
> bread and devour it. I'm in the hallway again, I'm in the hallway. The  
> radio's playing my favorite song. Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I'll  
> keep walking toward the sound of your voice._


End file.
